Yeah, we Believe you a Bad Update and the Whole World Fell Apart

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So, yeah … CrowdStrike had a day would be a pretty big understatement to what happened Friday, July 19, 2024. With a supposed bad update according to the CEO of CrowdStrike and next thing you know it and the blue screen of death is there, flights are delayed, and a multitude of systems won’t run. But what’s a little background on what happened that crazy time CrowdStrike sent everyone an update and then became everyone’s former cybersecurity provider.
Well, to offer a quick summary of the madness that happened the other day. We saw one of the large cybersecurity providers CrowdStrike release a sensor configuration update to Windows systems. This sensor configuration update then caused the system to crash, which is according to the CrowdStrike company blog and that it was not a cyberattack(which we believe wink wink). But with all jokes aside, if it were truly a cyberattack that would be significantly more detrimental than this already terrible update because that could mean potentially personal data lost. But like previously said that isn’t confirmed to be true, so one can only go off what is known.
What is largely known is that the CrowdStrike had a pretty grueling day not only fixing this problem they created for themselves but also this shot in their foot led the stock to take a pretty tumble. This 11% decline on Friday showed what happens if your systems go down without a proper rollout of testing on Windows devices. This also led to big players like Elon Musk even going as far as saying that they will no longer be using CrowdStrike, and I have a feeling others will follow just more silently in their dismissal of the former cybersecurity provider.
This leads to the ultimate point because all FatNarwhals like to find value in companies that were hit and undervalued right? But as for CrowdStrike, they made what seems to be at least in the short term a fatal mistake. So, at the FatNarwhal we don’t see that immediate undervalue urge to get into CrowdStrike even though we genuinely believe anyone can turn a company around and it has been done. It is just that after this incident CrowdStrike is going to take a long hard look in the mirror and then give us some proper reassurance that there will be a turnaround to come back stronger than before.